Ah, Valentine’s Day—how can we avoid it? A holiday that is soft, fuzzy; full of hearts, flowers, candy, and maybe, if we are lucky, something sparkly. It is also the day when you feel unloved if you don’t get any of those things. In the movie Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest sits turning a light on and off after her married lover never shows up for a date. Later, she tells him, “I will not be ignored,” creating chaos after her love turns obsessive and dark. Commercials and greeting cards have us thinking love is neatly tied up in quotes. Your love wraps twinkle lights around my heart. I’d give you all the marshmallows in my cereal. You make me all melty. Is this love? For some people, it is. And it suffices. Love manifests in many forms—from love of nature, music, art, to the sexual love we have for a partner. There is the love between friends, and the love we have for our children. We love our parents, brothers, and sisters. We have divine love for a higher power. We enter love through so many doors, while others remain closed to us.
Love as the Quiet Constant
There are seasons when love feels distant—something we once knew but can no longer touch. Yet beneath the noise, beneath the fear, beneath the stories we tell ourselves about being alone or unworthy, something steadier endures. Brianna Wiest’s reminder echoes here: “sometimes the love that saves you doesn’t feel like love at all until you look back and realize it never left.” Love’s constancy is often invisible in real time. It moves like groundwater—quiet, persistent, shaping us from below.
When Love Disappears from View
There are moments when the world goes dim, when the familiar warmth of connection feels out of reach. In those stretches, it’s easy to believe love has withdrawn. But John O’Donohue speaks of a quiet light that shines in every heart, a light that doesn’t extinguish even when our circumstances overwhelm us. This is the kind of love that doesn’t demand recognition. It waits. It breathes with us. It keeps vigil in the dark. And when the light returns, we realize it was never fully gone—only obscured by the weather of our lives.
Without realizing it, we were buoyed by the love we had but may not remember. The soft memory of a mother’s touch on a fevered brow. The friend who brought pizza and companionship after a break-up. The moment in prayer when we are struck by the power of divine love that transcends everything.
The Discipline of Staying
Love is often imagined as a feeling, but in difficult times it becomes a practice. David Whyte names this truth: sometimes the greatest form of love is simply staying—staying when everything in you wants to flee. Staying doesn’t always mean remaining physically present; sometimes it means staying with ourselves, refusing to abandon our own hearts when they ache. Sometimes it means staying with the truth, or with the slow work of healing, or with the people who matter even when the path is jagged.
This kind of love is not glamorous. It is a discipline, a devotion, a quiet courage. When we shake off the commercialization of love, we are left with its rawness. As the Bible says: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self‑seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love Beneath the Rupture
Life has a way of breaking our narratives. Plans dissolve, relationships shift, identities crack open. In those ruptures, love can feel like the first casualty. But Wiest offers another lens: real love is what remains when the story falls apart. The collapse of the story is not the collapse of love. In fact, it’s often the moment when love reveals its truest form—not as certainty or comfort, but as the thread that still holds when everything else unravels.
Love becomes the ground we land on, not the structure that failed. The challenge presents itself when institutions shift and falter, when the status quo we depended on lets us down. When the people we thought we knew reveal themselves as something we thought we could never love. The rupture when the life we thought we were living crumbles along with our identity. Who are we? What remains in the midst of destruction?
The Truth of Who We Are
There is a deeper layer still, one that Paul Selig gestures toward: love is what you are, even when you believe you have been emptied. This shifts the entire conversation. Love is not something we lose or regain; it is something we forget and remember. Even in exhaustion, even in grief, even in the hollow places where we feel scraped clean, the essence remains.
To live from this truth is to recognize that love is not an external resource but an inner inheritance—one that cannot be taken, only obscured. We are in dire times. There is political chaos, and households fall apart. We are unsure where we will land. Will we even know our future selves? The constant is this inheritance. Our ground of being. We may not feel it, but it moves us forward.
Let Everything Happen
Rilke’s invitation opens the door to acceptance: let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Love that endures is not fragile. It does not require perfect conditions. It can hold the full spectrum of human experience without collapsing. This is the love that walks with us through uncertainty, through loss, through the long nights when nothing makes sense. It doesn’t erase the difficulty; it accompanies it. It makes space for the whole of our lives.
We may doomscroll, fret, and worry. It is this internal chaos that reminds us of the love that lives within us. Why would we feel such pain if we didn’t know it?
The Return to Love
What remains, after the upheaval, is a quieter understanding. Love was never absent. It was working underground, reshaping us, steadying us, calling us back to ourselves. The return is not dramatic. It’s a soft recognition—a breath, a loosening, a sense of being met again. Love becomes not a feeling to chase but a presence to trust. It becomes the quiet constant we learn to lean into, again and again, as we continue the work of living with openness, depth, and soul.
We are speaking of something profound. We don’t know it in the everyday, but it is there, carrying us forward.
So, this Valentine’s Day, buy a fuzzy, squishy bear, chocolate—whatever delights you. Get it for yourself or for others. Declare love in any way that seems right. Be brave in love. As John O’Donohue says, “There is a quiet light that shines in every heart.”
© Copyright 2026 Sandra Lee Schubert. All Rights Reserved.
Sandra Lee Schubert has spent three decades exploring the intersections of creativity, spirituality, and meaningful work. A published poet, ordained interfaith minister, and former radio host of Wild Woman Network, she brings curiosity and heart to everything she creates. When she’s not helping service businesses tell their stories, you’ll find her seeking out quiet moments, tending her creative spirit, and asking the questions that matter. She believes in slowing down, listening deeply, and living with intention.
